Homosexual Bigotry

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If you grow up making fun of guys who are effeminate, then you have a son who is effeminate, you are upset in part because you do not want him made fun of. If he is not just effeminate, but gay, you have the double-whammy that all the stuff you imagined about your son being a chip off the old block is not going to happen. How will you relate to some one who does not like what you like? How will your friends, probably rednecks like you, feel? You know htey make fun of queers, meaning they'll be making fun of your son when they find out, though probably not to your face. That'll probably drive some kind of wedge between you and Billy Bob and Cleetus. So not only are you aliented from your own kid, you've got a rift between your lifelong friends. And you probably perceive it as a genetic dead end -- no wife for your son means no grandkids. And if you happen to actually sincerely believe something as absurd as Christianity -- which I'm told many of these sorts do -- then you've got another whammy coming in the afterlife, because your kid is going to hell and won't be in heaven with you. And that's just the issues I can think of off the top of my head at the moment. So there is a rationality underlying homophobia, if you care to try seeing it from the homophobe's perspective.

There are ways around all of these issues. However, it pretty much all starts with an open mind. That is a key thing most homophobes lack. They are not entirely to blame. As we age, we get set in our ways. If you grew up only hearing people approve of gay-bashing and universally condemning it as a gross and ungodly practice, your mind may never have been opened very far. I expect it is hard, if not impossible, to open one's own mind. It probably has to be done by an outside force. So it is hard to blame the person with a closed mind for having a closed mind, or to take credit if you are lucky enough to have an open mind.

I think that heterosexual people tend to find homosexuality repulsive in much the same way that people who hate mushrooms or onions find the consumption of mushrooms or onions repulsive.

It all goes back to the fact that hunger and sexual desire are fundamental human urges.

The more fundamental an urge, the greater the amount of disgust is felt toward the subversion of that urge.

Of course, to the intellectually honest human, homosexuality is about as repulsive as left-handedness:
http://clydeexplains.blogspot.com/2009/ ... njury.html

little factoid, 98% of homophobes are in denial gays, but how can that be?
Easy, its know as reaction formation AKA Doth protest too much.

1. Person has gay feelings/ urges
2. They deny they have it and attack it when they see it (Hence gay bashing)
3. it happens anyway

take Ted Haggard, evengaical homophobe who, turns out, was having gay butt secks with a male hooker on meth.

its like in elemantary school, the more boy likes girl, the more he is mean, why? Because the elemantary school cultutre says girls are icky and if a boy likes a girl, he is ostracized, so to keep people from knowing he likes said girl, he is doublely mean to her.

the other 2% are batshit religious nuts.

and my view on gays is simple, PARTY TIME!

I think part of it is related to social gender constructions:

"if a man is attracted to men, then
he is sort of like a woman
and a man being 'womanish' is
completely unacceptable"

It's like how people still get cross-dressing (almost exclusively done by straight men) confused with gayness. I think it's thought of as anti-manliness, and that causes all the male social conditioning rules to kick in (to harshly punish any 'female' traits or expressions).

[quote="frinj"]If you grow up making fun of guys who are effeminate, then you have a son who is effeminate, you are upset in part because you do not want him made fun of. If he is not just effeminate, but gay, you have the double-whammy ........../quote]

Firstly I have known and know of quite a few gay men who are not effeminate, secondly there is bigotry against lesbians, unless as Orwell has pointed out they fit into the hot lipstic lesbian category and are prepared to go the threesome witha man.

So far no-one has really explained why we still have all this bigotry, surely ruveyns Yuuch factor is not the reason why gay marriage is banned in so many countries.

I know that there are plenty of anti gay people who frequent this site, so come on folks lets hear your rational.

I do not accept that it has to do with thte patriacle nature of our society, I suspect that just as many women have this style of bigotry as men.

Does it have something to do with people needing an underdog to kick around, and gays fit into a nice category that can be easily identified and whos differences are significant enough to seperate them from 'normal people'

Here's one interesting point: While you do get true homosexual pair-bonds in the animal kingdom, many male mammals hump other males purely to show dominance over them. Interestingly, in ancient Greece a married, otherwise straight man was more or less expected to have sex with boys or male slaves - lesser status males - but if he let himself be on the receiving end, he lost his rights as a citizen. Plus, in many societies straight males have found it perfectly acceptable to rape other males in wartime, or as an act of humiliation: OK to do it, not OK to have it done to you, and unthinkable to consent to it and enjoy it being done to you. I could guess that men who saw sex as an act of domination (and many do, and it's a large part of the hetero male image in most cultures) would feel uneasy about gay men for that reason. Bluntly, somewhere in their monkey brains a male who lets himself be humped is subordinate, therefore contemptible. That's one possible theory. (But it's pop evolutionary psychology, which by its nature can't be proven: behavior doesn't fossilize. And it wouldn't explain why not every male is homophobic.)

But another thing is, gay/lesbian sex is non-reproductive sex. It's distracting people from the important task of breeding more worshipers/workers/cannon fodder. It might, if fully approved, lead people to believe that sex might not be solely reproductive, that it might, you know, have something to do with intimacy and with having fun. And that's very, very threatening to many people. Hence, like many other sexual pleasures that can't get you pregnant, certain authorities have done their best to either make them illegal or to convince people that they're warped or disgusting. The fact that there have always been so many people who went ahead and did them anyway is testament to the fact that the 'yuck' factor is more cultural than natural.